Star Trek Classics #2: Enemy Unseen |
 |
|
Collection published: 2012 Contents originally published: 2000-01 Read: September 2025 |
I got this "Star Trek Classics" collection from Hoopla; it contains three Star Trek: The Next Generation comic stories from the early 2000s, originally published by Wildstorm. The first is Perchance to Dream, a four-issue miniseries; this is set shortly before Star Trek Generations (it even features the film's mismatched uniforms), with the Enterprise-D coming to a Federation member planet where the aliens have three genders—but the new governor is being attacked by terrorists because she only has one partner, not the traditional two. It's a good premise for a TNG episode, but it's not a great comic: way too much dialogue and narration, plus art and coloring that makes the aliens largely indistinguishable from one another. Too many side characters on the Enterprise as well. There's a clever conceit here, in that Picard is sort of like a victim of multiple personality disorder (he also has the minds of Sarek, Locutus, and Kamin in his head), but this feels a bit tacked on as the resolution to the central maguffin, as opposed to being the central conception of the story.
The second story, "Embrace the Wolf," is set during season seven of TNG, and has the Enterprise encountering Redjac, the incorporeal alien from the original series's "Wolf in the Fold" which was supposedly Jack the Ripper. The story's best part is that it has Data battling Redjac in a holodeck simulation of Victorian London, with Data as Sherlock Holmes... but it just doesn't do very much with this idea, which really ought to have been the crux of the whole plot! The art is hit or miss; the artist seems to do particularly poorly with Troi and Crusher.
 |
| Also, Worf is randomly in this, but I kind of liked that—it was just how you told an Enterprise-E story in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you had to have Worf randomly pop up. from Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Killing Shadows #3 (script by Scott Ciencin, art by Andrew Currie) |
Lastly, there's The Killing Shadows, where the Enterprise-E (in the year before First Contact) battle evil alien ninjas. It's kind of incoherent and ridiculous, but I sort of admired that about it; it felt like a comic book in some ways, not just an attempt to render an episode on the page. But unfortunately it got dumber as it went on; I found it hard to believe that Riker could defeat a bunch of alien superninjas just because he stole their outfit. The inclusion of Sela is totally random. And I didn't really follow the climax at all.
So, yeah, "classics" may be a bit of an exaggeration, but as a Hoopla borrow this was fine. Glad I didn't pay for the print edition, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment